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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 27, 2016
noted an abundance of errors. (For ex-
ample, sunlight does not, in fact, contain
Vitamin D.) "Rarely was a guide in such
a position to lead innocents astray," she
concluded.The other review was by Tim
White. He, too, listed mistakes: Oldu-
vai Gorge, a famed fossil site, is in Tan-
zania, not Kenya. Calling the book "worse
than useless," he observed that Berger
"presents himself as the saviour, rescu-
ing a moribund South African paleoan-
thropology with his fund-raising skills
and ushering in 'A New Era.' " White
noted, "It is true that Berger's rise to
prominence signals a new era: one of
smoke and mirrors."
White is the director of Berkeley's
Human Evolution Research Center and
a professor of integrative biology. His
book "Human Osteology" is the stan-
dard text on skeletal anatomy. In ,
his peers elected him to the National
Academy of Sciences. White is "an ex-
tremely careful scientist," Carol Ward,
a University of Missouri paleoanthro-
pologist, told me. "Tim doesn't release
information until he's sure."
In Ethiopia in , White discov-
ered what was then the oldest known
hominin fossil: Ardipithecus ramidus.
"Ardi" was . million years old---roughly
a million years older than Lucy. It took
three field seasons to extract the partial
skeleton, and fifteen years before White's
analysis and interpretation of the bones
appeared in Science.
Berger has cited both White and
Clarke, who is still working on Little
Foot, as examples of scientists who with-
hold data and take too long to publish
findings. White considers Berger to be
engaged in "selfie science."When I first
asked White about his feud with Berger,
he declined to discuss it. He was wary
of false binaries: old scholars versus new
scholars, Luddites versus techies.
Then he changed his mind. One
morning in January, I found him at Berke-
ley, at the Free Speech Movement Café,
sitting beneath a placarded quote by the
political activist Mario Savio: "There
comes a time when the operation of the
machine becomes so odious, makes you
so sick at heart, that you can't take part . . .
and you've got to make it stop."
White, a wiry man in his sixties, wears
Woolrich sweaters and speaks in a res-
onant bass. He expressed concern about
the future of paleoanthropology and the
public's understanding of science. The
"C.E.O. types" who increasingly run
universities mistake media attention for
scholarship, he said: "It's the arm-wavers
who can command attention."
Shortly after the naledi announce-
ment, White wrote, in the Guardian,
that society is "witnessing portions of
science collapsing into the entertain-
ment industry." He told me, "I have is-
sues with narrative, as a scientist. If you
don't recognize the boundary between
fact and fiction, you should not be talking
about science to a public that has to
navigate that boundary."
I , , Berger vacationed with
his family in the Pacific archipelago
of Palau. During a guided tour, he
learned of a cave that contained old
bones. Palau protects its burial grounds,
but tourists had been known to venture
inside caves that contain human remains.
Berger followed a guide to a small pile
of fossils, and immediately identified
them as hominin.
Two years earlier, some fifteen hun-
dred miles to the southwest, on the In-
donesian island of Flores, scientists had
made headlines with the discovery of a
population of tiny humans. Scholars
were still debating whether the "hob-
bit" fossils represented a separate spe-
cies, Homo floresiensis, or modern hu-
mans living with dwarfism or disease.
Berger thought that the Palau bones
might elucidate the Flores mystery. Upon
returning home, he got the Palau gov-
ernment's permission to excavate, ac-
companied by National Geographic
filmmakers. Weeks later, he returned
with several colleagues and a film crew.
"The Lost Tribe of Palau" opens with
Berger paddling around in a kayak. "Lee
Berger is a renowned paleoanthropol-
ogist responsible for many groundbreak-
ing discoveries about early man," a nar-
rator says. Berger, sitting amid dense
foliage, says, "It really is one of the last
places on earth you'd expect to make a
major paleontological find."
A plot twist comes early: the cave
contains far more bones than Berger
had expected. Viewers learn that "the
find, combined with the range of ages
and sheer number of bones here, sug-
gests this cave could have been home
to an entire community." By the eighth
day, the team has collected more than
twelve hundred fossil fragments---the
cave appears "less like a dwelling and
more like a mausoleum." The bones
may be more than ten thousand years
old, the scientists decide; a prominent
brow ridge on one skull compounds the
sense that the creature had an "almost
freakish" appearance.
The brow bone, however, turns out
to be a calcrete deposit often found in
caves. Geologic dating soon shows the
skull to be younger than expected---be-
tween fifteen hundred and three thou-
sand years old. But the documentary
doesn't linger on disappointment: Ber-
ger's team decides that the bones may
represent a "tribe of previously unknown
tiny humans."This leads to an enticing
new mystery: why were the people so
small? The scientists conclude that per-
haps they weren't getting enough food.
On camera, Berger ponders whether
cannibals---a "warrior tribe," as the nar-
rator puts it---killed the islanders.Then
he sets out to explore a sunken cave.
The show winds down with him in scuba
gear, having made what the narrator
calls "the discovery of a lifetime." Pub-
licizing the show, National Geographic
declared that Berger's discovery "could
challenge rules of human evolution."
Berger served as the lead author on
a paper on the Palau bones, and in
it appeared in PLoS ONE, an
open-access, peer-reviewed online jour-
nal. An archeologist named Scott Fitz-
patrick, now at the University of Or-
egon, read the paper. He has been
conducting excavations on Palau since
. In a rejoinder titled "Small Scat-
tered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf
Make," he and two co-authors wrote
that the bones were consistent with
those of juveniles, and that the idea of
nutrition-based dwarfism was prepos-
terous, given the archipelago's "virtual
cornucopia" of seafood.
Berger recently told me, "Our paper
is solid." As for the Palau documentary,
he said, "It's a film," and added that he
had had no editorial control over it. Fitz-
patrick told me, "To Lee's credit, he gets
people excited about things, and with
naledi he's found what are probably some
amazing fossils. He's going against the
grain of established paleoanthropology
and doing it in a way that brings in young
scholars and social media. And he's a
reasonably smart guy and knows the